Last night between 2 and 4 am, I got it all figured out. Everything: life, death, Trump, climate change, even the Red Sox — everything. This morning, though, I forgot all the profound nighttime insights. So I decided to write an article criticizing the symbolic arrival of the Olympic flag in L.A. in anticipation of 2028.

Criticism is easy. Way easier to criticize something than to actually do it. Consider writing a book. So much easier to be a book critic than an author. Or a house; a lot easier to criticize the place than to actually design and build something. Or teaching. Easier to criticize a teacher than to do the teaching.

One reason criticism is so easy is that there is a rich and varied language of criticism. Lots of neat and clever pejorative words available to the critic. Examples: asinine, atrocious, detestable, ignominious, opprobrious, paltry, tawdry, stupid. There’s a million of them.

Its not like that with words of praise. There are many fewer, and most are not nearly as vivid or dramatic. There’s wonderful, fine, excellent, outstanding, praiseworthy, and so on. Mostly just nice words. No asinine or detestable.

The 2024 Paris Olympics deserves all the nice words one can think up. It was superb, well-done, and a marvelous event. Paris as the context was as good as it gets: the Eiffel Tower, the Arch-de-Triumph, and the river Seine, and just everything. Each and every venue was ready for its action.

And just imagine the logistics required to get all those athletes from wherever they were living to the correct venue (swimming pool, gym, playing field, game court, etc.) at the correct time. They did it perfectly. What a logistical feat!!

Grand kudos to the French Olympic organizers and operators, and to Paris.

As part of the closing ceremonies, the Olympic flag was lowered and handed to the mayor of Los Angeles, home of the 2028 Olympics. So far, so good. But then the flag was symbolically whisked to L.A. where there was a symbolic America waiting in the form of two groups of idiots purporting to be music groups. They ‘performed’, but no music, just chaos as the individuals stomped around a stage randomly making random noises. One disorganized ugly guy had no clothes and no hair from the waist up. Welcome, Olympics 2028, to America.

Who the hell selected these moronic groups to symbolize LA and America? There were options; they could have put together a film of Juan Soto of the LA Dodgers hitting a home run, or some real music by the LA Philharmonic Orchestra, or the Getty Museum, a view of UCLA, or the beaches, or nearby mountains, or even the Hollywood sign or Universal Studios, or Griffith Observatory, or the Walk of Fame. They could have, but they didn’t. Instead, they chose to embarrass and insult us with two groups of asinine and obnoxious examples of the worst of America’s new culture.

Of course, they also could have shown the tent cities, where) about 45,000 homeless souls live (or exist). Or some traffic jams. Or smog. More of America’s new culture.

Well, now the Olympic flag is somewhere in LA awaiting 2028. Paris will be a hard act to follow, but we wish LA the best. Hopefully, they will do better than the nauseating groups they selected to welcome the Olympic flag.